


come into my parlour

by arriviste



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Era, Depression, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-17
Updated: 2013-07-17
Packaged: 2017-12-20 11:51:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/886938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the revolution failed, Grantaire became Enjolras's keeper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come into my parlour

**Author's Note:**

> _The supreme happiness of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for one's own sake—let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self; this conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not lose the sight when one has love. And what love! A love wholly constituted of virtue! There is no blindness where there is certainty. Soul seeks soul, gropingly, and finds it._  
>     
>  _Victor Hugo, 'M. Madeleine in Mourning', Les Miserables._

After the revolution failed, Grantaire became Enjolras's keeper.

It was an unofficial title, and certainly Enjolras himself never chose to bestow it; but as day passed day, week overtook week, and months succeeded months, Grantaire's competition for the post began to ebb as the crowd of visitors thinned.

The Amis haunted his rooms at first, in groups and clusters, and then by turns, one giving up his place to the next. Courfeyrac told jokes and recounted conquests, Jehan read poems; Feuilly and Bahorel brought news from far parts of the city. Bossuet so stirred himself to attend class in Enjolras's stead and take notes, bringing him pages of careful scribing and packets of information from his lecturers.

Combeferre read from the newspaper and from his own case notes, keeping up a conversation on both sides that allowed Enjolras to close his eyes and listen to the beautiful clockwork logic of his orderly mind.

Joly diagnosed in Enjolras a wasting of the spirit along with the body. He prescribed cupping and bloodletting, and when that failed, beef tea, healthful syllabubs, exercise. Lack of exercise, to recover strength. Fresh air. No air. Bright light. Darkness. No, a room hung with red like an invalid's after fever. Milk of magnesium. Cod liver oil. A purgation of white bryony.

Enjolras allowed him to try whatever brought him pleasure until Joly retired in defeat just one miracle cure ahead of Grantaire's expressed desire to boot him from the sickroom.

Marius came by only once after July turned the corner into August, with all the ill-omen of a great black crow, hands thrust into the pockets of his old black coat. He wore it with awkwardness, like a garment not donned for a full season, and underneath his clothes were new and of good cloth.

“How much longer can you allow this to go on?” he asked, in the loud hushed whisper of someone unused to the sick of body or of mind. “Have you considered taking him to the hospital Bicêtre?”

“I can hear you perfectly well,” Enjolras said, and watched Marius shrink back. From his habitual corner, Grantaire boded like a shadow, waiting for his cue. “Why have you come? Have you grown tired of your soft-feathered nest and the soft bosom of your bride?”

Marius went crimson under his freckles, but refused to look properly chastened. “She is not yet mine. I would not marry without the presence of my friends. Courfeyrac, at least, will stand beside me on my wedding day.”

“How uncomfortable for you.” Enjolras closed his eyes. He did not have to see the target in order to find it. “Surely the presence of a failed revolutionary will lower your countenance before your family and hers? Your own presence does not count in that column, of course, since you have renounced entirely the principles for which you fought–”

“I came to offer an invitation to my wedding,” Marius continued over him, with the brittle dignity he'd always had. “I hoped to find the friend and leader who inspired me–”

“You will not, for he is dead. Good revolutionaries die with their causes.”

Marius left shortly after that, Bossuet hurrying apologetically after him, and Enjolras was almost blessedly alone once more.

“You know that is not true,” Grantaire said from his corner. “You live. You still draw breath.”

“Go away,” Enjolras told him, and was not obeyed. Grantaire kept his watch.

-

Since June, Enjolras had wanted nothing else but to be left alone, to lose his attendant flock – the friends he had brought into danger and then into defeat and shame. He had betrayed them, and in his love for them, he had betrayed himself. 

“Don't throw your lives away,” the captain had called out, an offer and a desperate prayer, and his friends had looked to Enjolras. Enjolras had looked at the small broken doll that had been Gavroche, at the wide empty eyes and the peaceful small features that had died still snarling defiance. In another life, perhaps he had found there only inspiration; in this life, he had looked at the tears on Courfeyrac's face, the shock on Combeferre's, at the sweet trepidation on Jehan's. At Joly's set expression, who feared a cold but welcomed a bullet.

The future had hung on the point of a knife, on the slip of a finger on the trigger of a musket, and then Enjolras had lowered the barrel. “Save yourselves,” he'd said quietly, and it had been a white flag in place of a red. A white flag that should have been his winding cloth, his alone.

“I will never leave you,” Grantaire said quietly on the day of Marius's last visit, and he had said it on that day of defeat as well.

And through that sheer dogged persistence, he had become Enjolras's keeper. The others visited, but it was Grantaire who kept the fire burning in the grate, who made sure Enjolras ate at least once a day, who coaxed him outside to walk through the park or to consider lurking in the back of the Assemblies.

If his friends were a cloud of flies Enjolras wished would find some other carcass to hover around, Grantaire was a spider. One who had found Enjolras lying on his back with his filmy wings in tatters, and who tended him with the same focused adoration as a spider wrapping a fly in sticky threads of silk, tighter and tighter. Wrapping him in attentions and small tendernesses, little connections to the world of the living.

-

“You must eat,” Grantaire said on a cold evening in January, one of the many days that blurred from greyness into greyness with no glow of gold or violent slash of blood to christen them into difference.

He had a plate of something in his hand, cold meat and hard bread; Enjolras turned his face to the wall. 

“Please?”

When Enjolras kept his face averted, he heard the familiar muffled sound of Grantaire swearing under his breath, the clink of the plate being set on the table, and then the softer noise of Grantaire moving, going to his knees beside the bed.

“Apollo,” he said quietly, brushing sweat-dark curls from Enjolras's face with a tenderness that would be touching, did Enjolras feel worthy of it any longer. “Please eat something.”

Enjolras had felt barely worthy of such gestures from those he valued when he had _not_ yet failed them; and he had never valued Grantaire, and Grantaire, in turn, had never followed him. He didn't know why Grantaire chose to follow him _now_ , when he was nothing, his life's purpose spilled out and lost; he did not know why Grantaire, of all people, should hang over his sickbed when Enjolras had succeeded in driving all others away.

“You have not driven them away,” Grantaire said, when he voiced this. “You merely make it difficult for them to stay as long in your presence as they would like, but still they come.”

“What must I do to send you after them?” Enjolras asked, and Grantaire brushed more hair from his face, tucking errant curls securely behind his ear. The small intimacies Grantaire had taken over were part of his web; not only coaxing Enjolras to eat, but forcing him to change his dress, and on occasion helping him to effect that change. Brushing his hair for him when Enjolras would let it snarl and tangle. Cleaning his boots. Paring his fingernails, like he was a nursemaid and Enjolras a small and not very capable child.

Sometimes Enjolras shouted himself hoarse and threw things and did what he could to drive Grantaire away. He always returned, and he kept forcing Enjolras to the same standards of cleanliness and order Enjolras had formerly demanded of himself, taking over tasks Enjolras had abandoned as though he was the keeper of some rural shrine to a forgotten god whose name no one remembered. As though sweeping out the dust and pouring libations was both part of his daily routine and his religion.

Enjolras turned his head away yet again, and Grantaire's hand curled in his hair, coiling the ringlets around his fingers as though to pull him back. “ _Will_ you eat?”

“I’m not hungry.” 

“If you tried, perhaps you would find your appetite,” Grantaire suggested, but the words were already defeated. His thumb found Enjolras's cheek and brushed from corner of eye to start of ear. “I wish you would. We cannot fight this battle every morning and night.”

Enjolras did not reply, and Grantaire sighed again.

“The fire is out,” he said. “The light is gone, the hearth is ash; and I do not speak only of your grate. Would you like a bath, Apollo? It's been some days.”

“It is cold,” Enjolras said listlessly. “It will be chill.”

“No, for I shall stoke the fire.”

Enjolras shut his eyes, but he nodded, and Grantaire breathed out in some satisfaction and slowly disentangled himself, rising once more to his feet.

-

Enjolras had always liked to bathe. He had never been a dandy, but he did like to be clean. To be dirty was to be less than pure; to have soiled linen, the way Grantaire had always had, and tallow drippings on his sleeve, to fail to comb his hair or polish his teeth. 

Before the failure, before Grantaire had appointed himself his nursery maid, Enjolras had only been able to bathe in full once a week; the other days, he had made shift with the basin and a washcloth, with oil of lavender and wintergreen. Clean smells, not the stronger scents of civet or ambergris. Even that once had been a trial: it necessitated assistance, bribing the woman who did for his room and the other students' on his floor to wrangle the copper kettle, hefting it to and fro from the pump with her strong hands and thick forearms.

He had considered this domestic struggle to be just one more example of the constant chains binding human to human and holding them in place. To draw a bath required help, using a fellow man as a servant; to take a bath was to implicate oneself in inequality, in a relationship of power and subservience. If one lived as the Romans did – in the closest man had come, perhaps, to freedom, before the Republic had been lost – one could take a bath without such trouble; could pay an _as_ and stroll into the public baths, could bathe and cleanse one’s person alongside senators and beggars alike. Change had been possible under such conditions: the streets could run red with blood and that blood could water liberty.

Now the struggle to be clean was just another among many. To exist required such effort, effort Enjolras had never considered before June. It was a struggle to breathe; a struggle to move; a struggle to eat; a struggle to dress. He wanted to close his eyes and let languor take him, but no one would let him.

It was Combeferre and Courfeyrac who truly stayed his hand; they could not make him eat or sleep or wash, could not make him feel, could not paint the world brilliant colours again, but they could make him promise not to take stronger measures to slip the chains holding him to earth. He had owed that much, and through his smaller protests against the indignity of continued existence, Grantaire pushed him.

-

It was wearying to watch Grantaire work, but strangely pleasing in a way it had never been to watch the washwoman. He built the fire up with quick capability, piling the wood and arranging the tinder, sitting back on his haunches to stoke it until it caught and burnt fiercely. He filled the copper kettle as though it was nothing, setting it to boil, and arranged the big tin bath on the rug before the fire with equal efficacy.

“I wish you had been as officious in the service of the revolution as you are in drawing me a bath,” Enjolras observed, for the Barrier du Maine was a sticking point that still rubbed between them on occasion, and Grantaire shot him a faintly amused look over his shoulder.

“The one is hardly equal to the other.”

“Perhaps if more had joined us?” Enjolras began, but did not finish the thought. The failure was his, not Grantaire's. “It would not have mattered. We would have failed in any case.”

The flames of the fire were gold and orange now, and their light gave Grantaire's dark hair a ruddy halo. His back was still to Enjolras, but it had tensed, and he looked somewhat set in the shoulders, the way he got whenever Enjolras fell too blackly into self-reproach or nihilistic muttering. Once or twice when Enjolras had begun to muse upon the futility of all action his face had twisted in such pain it had made the room feel suddenly airless. _Do not,_ he had said. _I cannot bear to hear my words in your mouth._

Enjolras had not plagiarised knowingly, and so apologised, but Grantaire had been strangely cold for some time still, and that afternoon he'd forced Enjolras to sit still and allow his hair to be washed and combed and cut, a punishment of care for an expressed lack of it.

“Come and take your bath,” Grantaire said shortly now. “Do not dwell on what we cannot change.”

The first kettleful of water was still slowly coming to the boil. “It is empty,” Enjolras protested, but sat up when Grantaire raised an eyebrow, beginning to unbutton his shirt.

Some days he was less capable, and Grantaire did that service for him, but today, he would divest himself of his own clothes. A small triumph.

“The fire's burning high. You won't be cold.”

It was still colder outside his bedclothes than within them, but Enjolras was morally weak, not a physical coward. He removed shirt and trousers and underclothing, and walked over to the hearth; stepped carefully over the rim of the tub and sat down in it, knees drawn up to his chest.

“Well done,” Grantaire said absently, and turned to lift the kettle away from the fire. “Let it cool a moment, and then you'll have water.”

Grantaire was as good as his word, and some minutes later he poured out the first caldera of hot water. It only filled the tub a few inches, lapping at Enjolras’s ankles and curling around his narrow hips, but it was warm, and there would be more. 

He unfolded himself and lay back against the rim and shut his eyes against the firelight, listening to the sounds of the fire, of Grantaire moving around his apartment, which they now shared, of the sloshing of water when Grantaire brought back the next kettleful from the pump outside and set it heating.

He drowsed, and with another kettleful the water level rose half-way to his shins, and then his knees were islands standing in hot water. As long as Enjolras didn’t think, taking a bath was comforting in the way few things were comforting anymore, and he could curl more tightly into himself and cease to be.

The fire had burned down a little by the time he opened his eyes once more to the touch of Grantaire’s hand on his shoulder.

“We have new soap,” Grantaire told him, like the housewife he sometimes seemed to be playing. “Bossuet dropped it in the other day. It’s fine-milled and scented with rosewater and jasmine; you should like it.”

“You would have me perfumed like a dandy?” Enjolras asked, and Grantaire smiled down at him, pulling a chair over to the side of the bath.

“I would have you clean and fresh as a daisy. You like being clean, Apollo, you know you do.”

“I do,” Enjolras allowed, and when Grantaire’s hand pushed on his shoulder again he took the cue and moved forward, folding his knees to his chest again. Then he let Grantaire steady his shoulders and tilt him back until the water was at his hairline, and then Grantaire’s fingers were in his hair again, and the air smelled of roses.

Grantaire's hands worked through the massed wet curls, rhythmic and soothing, and Enjolras let himself drowse again under his touch. It was strange how he had never noticed the talent or precision of those hands before these darkened days. He’d known Grantaire was an artist, or professed to be, a former painter of folly for the bourgeoisie to admire as they strolled through the Academy, alongside all the other empty works in which Jacques-Louis David’s original principles melted into imperialist propaganda. Everything declined.

“ _Enjolras_ ,” Grantaire said, and the tone in which he said it was stern enough that Enjolras opened his eyes. 

It wasn't just the way Grantaire had said it. Grantaire never called him by his proper name. And Grantaire had seemed unusually defeated this day, and the tempting promise of a bath now seemed to reveal itself as an obvious trap.

And they never spoke when Enjolras bathed; it was the one peaceful moment between them, always, when Grantaire stopped pushing and Enjolras stopped dragging. 

Grantaire's fingers continued to draw soothing circles into his scalp, but he sounded purposeful when he continued. “We cannot keep on like this. I don't know if you have truly reached the end of yourself, but I am reaching the end of me. I can’t continue to watch as you slip a little more each day. I can’t keep begging you to eat, and counting it a triumph when you consent to take a mouthful.” He sighed. “I don’t know what else I can do. I have tried kindness. I have tried anger. I have tried guilt. I need you to rouse, and I fear that I am trying to strike a spark from gunpowder without saltpeter.”

“I did not ask you to try,” Enjolras said. It sounded petulant to his own ears, so he shifted in the bath until he was more upright, less vulnerable than lying back with his head in Grantaire’s lap. Grantaire could have held him in place, but his hands opened, letting Enjolras pull free. “I'm grateful, but I didn’t ask you. I wanted–”

“I know what you wanted,” Grantaire broke in. His voice had gone clipped, unexpectedly fierce. “You can’t have it. Not even if we have to wrap you in swaddling and bundle you safely to the Hôpital.” 

Enjolras had never truly feared being taken to the Hôpital de Bicêtre, where the mad went; Joly would not allow it, Combeferre would forbid it. Only Marius would be fool enough to suggest it. But Grantaire said it like it was an option they’d all discussed, some final plan. 

This was a thunderclap in a clear sky, made worse for the fact that they never discussed the final events of those June days, never discussed Enjolras’s denied and desired death. It was a subject Grantaire had forbidden with shouting and raging and the throwing of projectiles in the first weeks after. In later weeks and months, he'd tried to raise it, and it had been Enjolras's turn to avoid it, not with anger but with utter withdrawal.

Grantaire’s hands found his tense shoulders, warm and soapy and reassuring. “Forgive me,” he said, squeezing tight. “Forgive me. I promise, I will never allow you to be taken there. You’re not mad; I know what is wrong with you, for I’ve felt it myself by times, but I don’t know how to mend you. I’m not saying I’ll _stop_ , Apollo. I'll still be here, day after day, but it’s killing me to do it. I never imagined there was so much of me left to burn through, but it will end with each of us as deadened as the other.”

Enjolras leaned back into his touch and tried not to tremble. It was the cold, that was all; the steam had dissipated. The water was still bloodwarm, but the air was chill. He could have told Grantaire how it would be, bathing in the winter.

“Go, then. I want to be let alone, and not bothered.”

“You've said that already,” Grantaire reminded him. “You say that every day, and do I leave? It's not a solution.” He rested his cheek against Enjolras's wet hair and sighed again.

They were quiet for a while. Grantaire had patently run short of answers; he must have come to the end of something, truly, to try appealing to Enjolras. He was sorry to know that the burden Grantaire had tried to take from him was also weighing him down into the mud, but he didn't know what Grantaire wanted from him. Perhaps at first his refusal of life had been a deliberate protest. Now it was something he could not stop. If there was a way back to feeling, he did not know it. 

“I wish to try something,” Grantaire said after another long silence. “You may hate me for it, or you may slap me, or you may denounce me to all our friends, but I will welcome that; I will welcome any rousing from you at this point. Move forward again, Apollo.”

Enjolras shifted obediently in his bath, but Grantaire's hands on his shoulders gently moved him more forward still, until he was folded again with his knees at his chin and the edge of his forehead was pressed against the far rim of the tub. Then they left him, and Enjolras shivered alone with his face to the fire and his back prickling with gooseflesh.

He heard the soft sounds of clothing being removed, and then Grantaire stepped into the bath behind him. “Don't take alarm,” he said, and Enjolras continued to shiver but did not startle. There was barely room in the tin bath for two young men, however they tightly they folded, and Grantaire settled himself around him with some difficulty. By necessity they were embracing; Grantaire's stronger knees on either side of his own, his chest against Enjolras's back, his arms coming around him to draw him back. 

This was intimacy on a new level entirely. 

It was not unpleasant, and after a moment Enjolras relaxed back against him. Was this what Grantaire had been afraid would stir his anger? It was surprisingly comforting to be held, to sit with warm water lapping around his navel and Grantaire curled at his back, and he said so.

“It is a liberty,” Grantaire said, “if not one of the sort you usually enjoy. I would take a greater, if you allowed me.”

“Take what you will,” Enjolras said, both because he trusted, and because he did not care; but apparently he had not imagined what Grantaire meant. “ –What are you doing?”

“I am kissing your neck,” Grantaire said, as though it were patently obvious. “Because it is a beautiful neck, and it should be kissed. Because I can feel the pulse beating in your throat when I do, and it assures me that you live and breathe now that the evidence of my eyes is no longer enough to prove it. Do you dislike it?” 

He sounded like he wanted Enjolras to tell him that he did, but like Grantaire's arms around him, it was not unpleasant. Grantaire's lips were soft and their kisses gentle; when Enjolras failed to protest, they continued down the slope of his shoulder, and then back to linger under his ear. They were better than not unpleasant; agreeable, in fact. 

Enjolras tilted his head to allow him more room, and Grantaire ceased entirely. “You cannot – Apollo, is it that you permit this, or is it that you do not care enough to stop me?” 

“Does it matter?”

“To me, if not to you.”

Enjolras didn't want to argue further, but Grantaire seemed set on it. “Then choose the answer that pleases you.”

Grantaire set his teeth softly in Enjolras's shoulder as if words themselves were beyond him. This was where Enjolras had pushed him, day by day and week by week; even his long and inexhaustible stream of talk had dried up like a river dammed by constant frustration. 

“That's not answer enough for me. _Damn_ you – what must I do to make you care about anything?” 

Enjolras had no answer for him. He bent his neck to the side again in offered apology, but Grantaire didn't attend to it. 

Instead, his arm slipped from its hold on Enjolras's waist and slid beneath the cooling bathwater, and Enjolras startled. 

Grantaire was touching him with an intimacy that was beyond anything; his hand under the water had ventured between the bow of Enjolras's legs, had found and curled around his prick.

No one ever touched him like that. He had barely liked to do so himself when at least he'd occasionally felt the urge to, before those bloody days in June, and now Grantaire was holding his prick with gentle firmness as though it had always belonged in the circle of his hand, as though its half-mast state was not something which every instinct of civility dictated he should ignore.

“ –What are you _doing_?”

“Looking for my answer,” Grantaire said. “I had not hoped – no, do not pull away, I have found it, and I am not ill-pleased with it.”

“What are you – Is this another of your goads? Would you shame me into life?”

“Give me a handle and I will use it,” Grantaire said seriously, and his hand stayed snug, his thumb moving to caress. “Give me but an inch; I will take it. I say these things with a straight face, and I mean several things by them, but I am deathly solemn too. Whatever I must do, I will, and I will not count the cost. Use me, if it helps. Use me up; pour me out.”

“You're a man, not a jug of wine to drain and be done with,” Enjolras said, and gasped with involuntary feeling as that thumb continued to stroke, to move, to rub. “ –You are a _man_. What are you doing? What end to this do you see?”

“Yes, make that sound,” Grantaire said, and now his whole hand was coaxing, and his mouth was working again against the back of Enjolras's neck, better than agreeable. “Yes. Again. And again. I would make you smile, Apollo, and failing that I would make you moan. I would make you feel _something._ ”

Enjolras did not speak further, but breathed in rough pants into the cold air, broken strips of sound. He could feel pleasure being coaxed out of him, a pleasure that wasn't centered on his prick or Grantaire's sliding hand on him alone, but diffused from that center to envelop the broader comforts of warm water and warm body and smooth skin around him. 

His release when it came was unforced and unhurried, but a surprise nonetheless.

“I have you,” Grantaire said, and Enjolras leaned back against the support of his chest and shut his eyes. 

They breathed together, Grantaire's arms around his waist again and his chin hooked over his shoulder, and stayed like that until the water had gone so cold that not even their closeness could preserve it.

“We must get dry,” Grantaire whispered at last, and Enjolras moved his head in small agreement. He was boneless; he had dissolved in these waters and had not been reformed; he was tired, and he did not want to open his eyes and confront reality. 

Still Grantaire pushed him gently forward to the support of the far rim, pulled himself free, and got to his feet. Enjolras could hear him moving, drying himself and stepping into such clothes as would make him decent once more, and then he returned. 

His hands were kind but unyielding under Enjolras's armpits, coaxing him to rise yet again. “Come, Apollo. See, the water has stolen all your marrow. Your knees are weak.”

“If they tremble, it is your fault,” Enjolras said, but he freed himself and stood alone, and when Grantaire passed him his shirt he drew it on without aid. Trousers followed, and then a cloth to dry his hair.

Then he was awkward again, and Grantaire was looking at him, and Enjolras could not look back. Not after being so thoroughly unmanned before him, not after stooping to such a low that his – friend? He supposed that was true, now – his friend had felt the need to whisper in his ear, to offer himself up as kindling to his fire.

When he did at last, there was nothing different about the way Grantaire was regarding him. His damp dark hair was massed close to his head, but his brilliant blue eyes were still soft and concerned, his cheeks ruddy from the bath.

Enjolras did not know what to say to him. 

“I did not suspect you were an invert,” he said at last. For all that Grantaire had fallen short of Enjolras's moral measure, he had seen Grantaire always as fully a man, a master at fencing, at boxing, and at flirting with women. 

“That's not how I would describe myself,” Grantaire said, “but it serves, I suppose. I am a lover of men as well as women.” The blue eyes were briefly shuttered as if in calculation, turning over whether to take up a weapon or leave it safely idle, and then they were turned on him again. “And if you did not suspect me for an invert, I confess that I suspected you.”

Enjolras shook his head in instant negation. “I?” 

“You,” Grantaire said. “Don't you know it? You, with your refusal to court, to play at love with ladies of both high and low repute; you, immune to the hundred eyes and palpating bosoms brushing against your arm in sweet importuning; you, who breaks up all talk of mistresses with angry words.”

“I am chaste,” Enjolras said, the instant denial of long habit easy to re-assume, and then had to correct himself on a slight particular. “I was chaste. It is not the same.”

The calculation was still there. “Yes, of course, but did you refrain from the company of woman, or from the desire for men? Will you tell me felt no pang when you looked at Courfeyrac's dark curls, no thrill when admiring Bahorel's broad shoulders, no flutter of delight when watching Feuilly's clever fingers?” A pause. “Or from Marius's ardent enthusiasm?”

Unfair.

“They are my brothers,” Enjolras said, voice faltering. He did not think of them in that way. Surely. Surely he did not. If he had delighted in their fellowship, if their clasps of his hand or their claps on his shoulder meant more to him than any other touch, that did not mean what Grantaire was trying to imply. “I would not–”

“Apollo, I have seen it, because I have watched you more closely than anyone,” Grantaire said, and he was watching him closely now. “I don't say this to shame you, only to hold the mirror up to your face. We'll leave it if you'd rather. What of me, then, if not them?”

Grantaire, who had done his best to bring Enjolras out of despair, who had persisted when all others had given up. Who had tried kindness, and anger, and guilt, and every other goad: who had finally thrown himself into the ring as if throwing himself away.

“You are also my brother,” Enjolras said. He expected Grantaire to smile at the acknowledgement, but he shook his head instead. “In arms, as in Sparta, or –”

“I will not lie to you,” Grantaire said. “I will not let you lie to yourself. I don't want to be one of your brothers. In another life, perhaps, I could have been happy as your shield-bearer.” His expression was still grave, but his eyes looked past Enjolras, and his mouth quirked with some faint remembered sweetness. “Not Sparta, but Thebes. I would joyfully have carried your spear, and gone to my knees to affix your greaves, and I would have stood by your side to face death without a care.” He stopped and rubbed a hand over his face; that was a painful thought for both of them. “I never meant to mention any of this to you, but here we are. As surely as Alcibiades sat at the feet of Socrates, I sit at your feet.”

That was a declaration, of sorts. No, it was a declaration entire. 

He couldn't imagine himself as any sort of Socrates. He had never been a teacher to those who followed him, that had been Combeferre. Grantaire made a better Alcibiades: quixotic and maddening and self-destructive.

Enjolras had never pretended to understand why Grantaire was the way he was; before last June, it hadn't seemed important. Since, he hadn't felt curious enough to care, and that was the greater sin. After everything Grantaire had done for him, Enjolras had resented his attentions, and he'd seen them as a slow torment, forcing him into a life he would rather slip. He had not followed Grantaire's imagined motivations to their end. Guilt, he'd supposed vaguely. A desire to be useful, perhaps. A continuing echo of the mocking adoration Grantaire had always played at, a habitual provocation that had not yet worn itself out.

And now Grantaire was telling him that his adoration was in earnest, and that was another truth Enjolras had never wanted to look at directly, held up to him in such a way that he could not turn his head aside.

“Oh,” he said. It was rather painfully inadequate to its purpose.

“Indeed,” Grantaire said. “Don't let it bother you. Like the other, we'll leave it if you'd rather.” He rubbed a hand across his face again, smearing his features briefly out of alignment. “I spill truths tonight like a man in wine. Sit down.”

Enjolras sat down, frowning, and Grantaire stood in front of him for a long moment, and then glanced longingly across the room to the bottle on the far shelf. He didn't move towards it, though, and whatever he had found in Enjolras's face seemed to satisfy him, in the old bitter fashion. 

“It's been months since the barricade, Apollo, seven of them; let us lay some ghosts to rest. If we are to go forward, to do anything but tread water, we must.” Enjolras drew back, shaking his head, but Grantaire swept on, ruthless. “I can't let this moment pass. I would that I could, because I've lain burdens and truths enough on you tonight, but you are paying some sort of heed – so. Another truth, and one we can't leave any longer without facing. You told me to go at the Musain, and I would not.”

Enjolras had made his way there alone after telling his friends to flee, purposeful as a bullet in flight. He'd known that he could hold it by himself for some small time, and that the soldiers would be forced to clear it as they moved their cordon into the city, street by street, hunting out the last still standing their ground. He'd meant to die there, and to buy more time for his friends in doing so. He hadn't counted on finding Grantaire still under the table he'd fallen by when Enjolras had told him to leave the first time, not to disgrace the barricade with his inebriation.

Grantaire was more sober than not, of late. The pattern of his days had altered, from long drunkenness with brief patches of lucidity, to long periods of sobriety, with only occasional black nights spent drinking and trying to force Enjolras to argue with him, to prick some kind of response from his shapeless despair. He was looking at Enjolras and waiting for a response now, and the bottle of wine across the room had been re-corked after it was breached, days ago, and still sat there half-touched.

“I wanted you to go,” Enjolras agreed. They weren't speaking about the first time he gave Grantaire that order, but the second, when Grantaire had spoiled his plan for a solitary martyrdom, turning up unwanted like a fly in ointment. “I didn't want you to die, and you would have, had you stayed. I was the one who was meant to – _I was supposed to die,_ ” he said with a sudden and piercing pain. “It was what I was meant for, what I had prepared for – it was my right. It was my _time._ ”

In the low light from the grate, Grantaire's face reflected back the pain Enjolras had touched in himself again, the crimson scarring over an aging wound tearing open. 

“I know,” he said quietly. “I know that now. And perhaps I should have let you, and you would have gone in one glorious burst like a Chinese firework. But I didn't, and having hindered you, I won't let you go in some lesser fashion.”

It wasn't a question as much as another cri de coeur too long repressed: " _Why not_?” 

“You know why not,” Grantaire said implacably, and against the shame of being caught in deflection Enjolras looked away, dropping his eyes. “Like I said, we won't speak of it. I'm not sorry for _that,_ Apollo, but sometimes I regret not leaving when you asked. Most of the time I'm almost wholly satisfied with my actions: you still live, and breathe, and disdain me. It's selfish of me to find satisfaction in that when you grudge it so much, perhaps, but I am a selfish man. But sometimes – if I'd known what it would do to you – I think – I _know_ – I should have died beside you instead. Then we could have both been happy.”

There was a flaw there, spoiling the logic. “It was over,” Enjolras told Grantaire, who was marking every small movement of his face and the small shapings of his mouth like someone searching for his truth. _Find me an honest man,_ Diogenes had cried. “Any further deaths but mine would have been unnecessary waste. And I didn't want you to– You weren't willing to die, then or any other day.”

“As a glad sacrifice to the flame of freedom?” Grantaire asked, and his eyes were still searching. “No, I wasn't. Would I have fought with all of you, pressed to the point? Yes, and died if that was how my fate fell out. Does that mean less, that it would not have been a willing death?”

Enjolras could understand a death for a purpose, giving all gladly and accepting what came, but he couldn't understand fearing and loathing and despising that death and going to it anyway. It wasn't a question of courage but something more, and it had made it seem impossible to take Grantaire with him on his way down, knowing how he felt. 

It hadn't been much of a rescue and Enjolras hadn't done it gladly. He'd forced Grantaire from the Musain and into the street, and shouted at him to run, the soldiers would be coming; they were moving inexorably through the arondissement, searching for the rebels too slow or too stupid to disperse. Every second brought them closer.

Grantaire had looked at him with dazed and sleep-fuddled eyes – Enjolras had never realised before how blue they were; bluer even than Marius's – obviously struggling to make sense of his words, and it had been equally obvious that he wasn't going to make it by himself. 

Enjolras had tried to shout sense into him anyway, as if volume and force alone could sober him, and Grantaire had blinked and blinked again, and the glow from a distant torch had turned the side of his face orange-gold and limned his dark hair with red light. Something was on fire a street or two over; there was smoke thick in the air, and above it the sharper acrid tang of gunpowder. “If you stay, I will stay,” he'd said finally, like that was the proper answer. “I won't leave you.”

Enjolras had snarled at him in wordless fury and then gone to his side and half-dragged him along; he'd hoped to get Grantaire somewhere safe enough and then return, but there'd never been a chance.

Standing before him now, Grantaire looked tired. He ran a hand through his hair, and his shoulders squared, and Enjolras could read him better now; that was Grantaire bracing himself for another onslaught, preparing before another push. “This is refreshing, almost. You haven't argued with me in so long. Would it were to any other end – _Enjolras_.” 

Grantaire suddenly dropped to his knees before his chair. He put a hand on Enjolras's knee, and waited until Enjolras looked up at him. 

“Tell me truthfully. Would it be better for you if I really did leave? Would you find yourself again if I was not always near, reminding you? You would fall entirely to pieces without my help, of course, but–”

Enjolras bit his lip, convulsive, and did not speak, and the hand on his knee lightened as though suddenly doubting its right to be there. It lifted; he almost let it go, and then suddenly trapped it in place with his own. 

“I don't blame you,” he told Grantaire, and that was another truth that had been unsaid too long, perhaps. “I have resented you, yes, but not blamed. Your presence is not what poisons my wellspring of spirit. What haunts me is myself, alone – for bending, earlier, for grasping at a reed of hope when I should have thrown myself into the furnace and the rest with me. Weakness stopped me. A nine year old boy showed more courage of his convictions. I was offered a chance to save my friends, and I took it and betrayed my country and my principles. And then I took it over again.”

It was the shameful dark truth he'd kept cradled to his breast like a child all these months, suckling all the _animus_ from his body, and he knew that Grantaire already suspected it; knew it. They all knew it. They gathered in his bedroom like mourners at a wake and looked at him with pity, and with disdain, and with possibly a little honest surprise that they'd ever lept to follow where he led – he'd led them all into a blind alley, and then failed them even further. He had cried off before the boom of the guns; he had looked at the faces of his friends and found that after all, he would not pour out their blood in libation to a future they could not enact all on their own. 

“Ah,” Grantaire said. His hand under Enjolras's shifted, struggling for freedom. He loosened his hold, but instead of tearing away Grantaire simply twisted their grip until it was Enjolras's hand under his, and his own was tight around it. “And now we come to it. This is the canker that rankles in the soul, is it not? Is it so terrible, to love? Is that the weakness you would cast from you?”

“To love something higher than France? _Yes_. To place something before Patria–”

“O mighty one,” Grantaire said, and the faint smile sat strangely on his mouth, long unfamiliar. “Look on your works and despair. See Courfeyrac passing the bar and practicing as a barrister; see the fine new cravats he sports, and the charities he pays out of pocket now that he has funds to do so. See him helping the indigent who cannot afford his costs. See Combeferre with all his wisdom and kindness and tell me his life alone is not a gift to all the world. Behold him and Joly and their new offices; see them opening their doors on Sundays to the poor, treating their ailments without charging.

“Look on Bahorel and Bossuet, who will never grow old as long as they live, and let them live long and truly Parisien lives, floating like the butterfly on a summer's day. See our young and gentle Jean Prouvaire, who cannot speak for blushing and who spreads sweetness to all who cross his path. See Feuilly, with the good work of his hands and the better work of his heart, laying the slow and quiet blocks of true revolution each and every day. See Marius, wed at last to his vanishing nymph, and delirious with joy, I am told, setting up his household and preparing his nest for the increase of the Pontmercy line.

“Tell me these are not good things. Tell me they do not count when the scales are weighed and balanced. Tell me you do not close your eyes and see them all lying dead in some alley, every bright and learned and merry and sweet soul. Tell me their lives do not count for much.”

Perhaps Grantaire had not quite lost all his touch for long speeches, but that was a new tenor.

“Their lives,” Enjolras conceded. “Yours, also.” They counted for much. A great deal. And yet he would have fed them all to the flame if they had had even a whisper of a chance; perhaps that was the true canker, knowing how close he had come to that. Either prospect was terrible, and he was grain between their millstones. 

“Can't you make it enough?” Grantaire squeezed his hand. “I know it is hard – I know the scales do not balance easily. I told you, I went through my own long night of despair. I lost my center, my God, my belief in anything at all; my muscles and sinew still worked, my mouth opened and closed, but there was no higher spirit animating my form. I drank to blot out that truth, to fill the black well at my core, but nothing could ever fill it long; it was a cavity of the soul. And then I found something to fix on, a steady point to steer by.”

Enjolras looked his question, and the smile Grantaire gave him was sadder and sweeter still. “Belief,” he said. “Love, perhaps. A stronger soul to cling to. I would give you back these things, if I could, if by every despairing word and every breath you grudge did not strip them from me. Take all these lives and see if they will serve, and add me to the balance, if it helps.”

It was only now that Enjolras understood fully what Grantaire offered when he had said _use me up; pour me out_. Two separate points, two separate blows. Yes, Grantaire desired him, but also Grantaire loved him, and if it was not a pure love, it was a love that had abased itself, and then effaced itself, a love that had shown itself in long quiet service and then in final desperate action. 

“It's not enough,” Enjolras said reluctantly, and the resigned look on Grantaire's features pricked him. It pricked more when Grantaire gently released his hand and set it back in his lap, and walked over to the fireplace. “Their lives, and yours, and mine; you cannot supply me with everything I lack. I can't take everything I need from you, even though you offer it.”

“It was only a hope,” Grantaire told the dying fire. “I knew, and yet I hoped.”

“It's not that. Whatever you would give me would only be wasted, like frankincense offered to a dead god.” A cavity of the soul; that was a good way to describe it. A center that would not hold. Grantaire opened his mouth to argue, and Enjolras shook his head. “I am not being cynical. You have given me too much already, and it has trickled away and been lost, and I have been too careless and not marked its passing.”

“And so we return again to 'Go away, Grantaire' –” 

“Only if you wish. I won't order you to go again.”

“That's something,” Grantaire told the little posy of flowers on the mantel Jehan had left on his last visit. The drooping vetch and meadowsweet failed to respond, and he touched one wilting petal with a fingertip, sadly, and turned back to Enjolras. “Well, Apollo. That was my poor idea of some solution. Have you a better?” He didn't look like he expected any answer.

There was a long silence.

“I would be needed again,” Enjolras said at last. 'That is the worst; I have served my purpose, and lived past its end. My friends love me, but they no longer follow. That is what I want from you,” he said, and it sounded less of a strong conclusion than he had meant it to, more plaintive. “A purpose. Need something from me.”

“You don't know what you're asking,” Grantaire said, kindly dismissive; then, almost warning, “You don't know what _I_ might ask.”

Enjolras tilted his neck, and made the movement something deliberate, a giving of permission. “Ask.” 

Grantaire pushed away from the fireplace and walked over to him, dropping to his knees before the chair again. He put his hand to Enjolras's jaw and lifted his face to the light, where nothing could be hidden. He turned it back and forth, searching for shadow, and the tendon in his wrist was drawn tight as a bowstring. 

“You're serious,” he said, with a laugh that was half-despairing. “You _can't_ be serious. I have always been sitting at your feet, Apollo, and you have never before deigned to look down. What difference can knowing that I love you make to your accounting?”

“I don't know,” Enjolras admitted. “I don't know, but it adds to the scale.” He glanced at Grantaire's hand, and Grantaire made to remove it, as though reminded of his trespass. A look stayed him. “I cannot say that they balance; I cannot say when they will balance; I do not know if they will ever balance again–”

“But will you try? Only try. That's the difference I would have my little weight make.”

Enjolras did not have words, but he lent forward the little distance between them and pressed his forehead to Grantaire's in silent pledge, and his clean and drying hair fell forward between them like a curtain heavy with the scent of roses.

Grantaire gave a long sigh. His hand hovered between them, and settled on Enjolras's chest. It slipped slightly left until it rested flat over the place where a bullet might have pierced, like some Theban warrior placing his shield across the heart of his lover.

After a moment, Enjolras raised his own hand and set it over his, holding it to him, over the invisible wound.


End file.
